The Kapteyn Package provides tools for the development of astronomical applications with Python. It handles spatial and spectral coordinates, WCS projections and transformations between different sky systems; spectral translations (e.g., between frequencies and velocities) and mixed coordinates are also supported. Kapteyn offers versatile tools for writing small and dedicated applications for the inspection of FITS headers, the extraction and display of (FITS) data, interactive inspection of this data (color editing) and for the creation of plots with world coordinate information. It includes utilities for use with matplotlib such as obtaining coordinate information from plots, interactively modifiable colormaps and timer events (module mplutil); tools for parsing and interpreting coordinate information entered by the user (module positions); a function to search for gaussian components in a profile (module profiles); and a class for non-linear least squares fitting (module kmpfit).

GIPSY is an acronym of Groningen Image Processing SYstem. It is a highly interactive software system for the reduction and display of astronomical data. It supports multi-tasking using a versatile user interface, it has an advanced data structure, a powerful script language and good display facilities based on the X Window system.

GIPSY consists of a number of components which can be divided into a number of classes: 1.) The user interfaces. Currently two user interfaces are available; one for interactive work and one for batch processing. 2.) The data structure. 3.) The display utilities. 4.) The application programs. These are the majority of programs.

GIPSY was designed originally for the reduction of interferometric data from the Westerbork Synthesis Radio Telescope, but in its history of more than 20 years it has grown to a system capable of handling data from many different instruments (e.g. TAURUS, IRAS etc.).